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Flat image & Office versions

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Just curious to what everyone else is doing with their flat ris images, I'm trying to customize one as much as possible to rid our organization of all the riprep stuff that is 4 years old now.

My initial idea is to put office in a folder on the flat image....ex: $oem$\install\applications\office\2003\ but with all the reading I have done I really haven't seen a better way, can it be compressed to save space?

My goal is to have a completely automated flat image which I'm doing pretty good for the start of it, I keep reading around on the unattended install area to get all the info I can lol.

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Generally when I was still doing RIS installs I used RunOnceEx to install apps over the network based on answers in the RIS wizard when booted (used a cmd batch to save variables into the first reboot after OS install). Then the correct <insert product here> would get installed from it's network install location based on the RIS wizard, and that also made maintenance easy as the install location on the network never changed.

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Generally when I was still doing RIS installs I used RunOnceEx to install apps over the network based on answers in the RIS wizard when booted (used a cmd batch to save variables into the first reboot after OS install). Then the correct <insert product here> would get installed from it's network install location based on the RIS wizard, and that also made maintenance easy as the install location on the network never changed.

Over the network installs is how we do some of our apps now, but we have to move away from it due to the bandwidth usage in locations. It has actually worked pretty good so far, my ris image (with all the app installs and updates in it) is only 3.4gb and when on the system it takes between 8gb and 10gb of disk space which is fine since we have 20+ gb drives in our systems.

I was just trying to find a way to make the process take a little shorter, so far I have it between 55 minutes and 1hr and 12 minutes depending on symantec crappoint installing correctly. I have taken all my cmd scripts and started compiling them into a single autoit executable instead and that has helped the speed quite a bit. Here is a list of some of the stuff that I have done so far lol.

; 1. Slipstreamed Version of Windows XP SP3 with all updates as of 5/8/2009

; 2. Microsoft Office 2007 Professional Plus with SP1 & All updates as of 5/8/2009 & Office 2003 with recent sp and updates

; 3. Windows XP DST Time Patch - December 2008

; 4. Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool V2.9 (April 09)

; 5. Windows Genuine Advantage Patch (KB892130)

; 6. Widnows Genuine Advantage Patch #2 (KB898461)

; 7. Windows Silverlight 2.0

; 8. Malwarebytes (approved by sburns)

; 9. Installing Eusing Free Registry Cleaner 2.5 (approved by sburns)

; 10. VNC

; 11. Windows Photo Story

; 12. Adobe Flash Player Plugin

; 13. Adobe Flash Player Plugin Active X

; 14. Adobe Shockwave Player

; 15. Adobe Authoware Player

; 16. Adobe Reader 9.10

; 17. Quicktime 7.6 Build 472

; 18. Java 6.0 Update 13

; 19. Cleanup 4.5.2

; 20. Overdrive Media Console (Downloaded 5/x/2009)

; 21. Network Card Power Management Disable

; 22. Removing Language Bar

; 23. PowerDVD 7.0

; 24. PowerDVD 7.0 SP1

; 25. SMS Client

; 26. Symantec Endpoint (Testing)

; 27. Renaming Local Admin account

; 28. Adding Domain Users to the Local Administrators Group

; 29. System Tweaks

; 30. Compatible Workstation Security

; 31. Removing Power Management, Misc Shortcuts, Cleanup

; 32. Roxio CD Creator 9.0DE

; 33. File & Print Sharing Removal

; 34. Audacity for Windows

; 35. Audacity for Windows MP3 Addon (Lame)

; 36. Tweaks for Roxio to turn off reminders

; 37. Windows Personalized Removal

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If you've got lots of customization to do, you could look into using MDT + WDS (2003 SP1 or SP2 server, or 2008 server required) instead of RIS. MDT is a lot faster, and WinPE will give you more control over the load process.

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If you've got lots of customization to do, you could look into using MDT + WDS (2003 SP1 or SP2 server, or 2008 server required) instead of RIS. MDT is a lot faster, and WinPE will give you more control over the load process.

back from the dead but we ran into some issues with workstations only having 256mb of ram otherwise I was going to strongly look into MDT.... by the time we get them all upgraded we'll probably move toward 7 anyways